Power Struggle
by kills.softly
Summary: Perhaps it was the power struggle that most fascinated him.


**A/N: It's only a little no-plot thing. I just haven't written in years and needed to get started.**

It was so stupidly, accurately typical. Larten still had a nasty scar on his shoulder from his hellish Trials—and he still considered himself lucky to have escaped them alive—but otherwise they were but a memory for him. A memory he most certainly had _no_ desire whatsoever to revisit.

But, of course, when had that ridiculous, reckless, idiotic woman ever had any sense? Vampires escaped the Trials through the skin of their teeth and forever counted themselves lucky. It had been a surprise to everyone when she'd emerged with only superficial burns from the Hall of Flames, and a shock that she'd somehow managed to succeed where so many _men_ had failed.

Anybody would've thought that would be enough to satisfy her.

"What is it?" he asked, and pressed his hands to his forehead in despair. "If you _have_ a death wish, there are more convenient and less public ways to do it."

She wasn't listening. He knew well enough that once she'd made up her mind, there was no use in trying to change it.

"If I passed them once," she said, and grinned at him across his desk. "The who's to say I can't do so again?"

Explaining to a child why they couldn't have sugar would have been easier. "_Because_," he said, taking great pains to make sure she understood. Her eyes weren't on him—she was always moving, always doing something, and she'd begun to flip through a book distractedly—but he supposed if he enunciated clearly enough the point might just get through. "You aren't _prepared_.. You know that you cannot simply stroll into these things without thinking properly about them."

"I have thought properly about it," Arra defended. "Just because you don't agree doesn't make me automatically _wrong_." She crossly folded her arms across her chest, a stubborn signal that from this point on any opposition to her plans would be blocked.

Larten Crepsley stared across at the crazy woman trying to convince him that risking her life for very little gain was worthwhile. A part of him wondered why she'd come specially to tell him if she'd known she was going to go ahead with it anyway, and then a part of his wondered what it was inside him that cared whether she wanted to risk everything for nothing.

He knew why he cared. It was all too _glaringly obvious_.

"I do not think it is at all wise," he said bluntly, concentrating hard down on his hands. "That is my opinion on it."

A little chuckle followed that statement. "And when was it," she asked. "That I _asked_ for your opinion?"

"The moment you arrived," he responded. It was all too easy to lightly trade these little teasing arguments and not to concentrate on either of the real issues at hand: the fact that she was very possibly signing up for instant death and the fact that he couldn't _bear _it. "Why did you ask my permission if—"

"—I did _not _ask your permission," she snapped. "I just...wanted to tell you about it."

The fact that she'd not been able to come up with an excuse for her behaviour quickly enough meant that she'd lost their little battle of words, and he wasn't about to poke fun at her for it.

"You wanted to tell me," he said. "Because you knew I would tell you not to."

"But how would I have known that?"

Ridiculous, reckless, idiotic woman. She knew everything about him, just like he knew everything about her, and suddenly he didn't know why it had surprised him so much.

"I don't care," he said, too quickly, and when he noticed she'd managed to break his composure she smiled as if _that _was what finally pleased her. "You can do whatever you want, Sails. But if you were to die it _would_ be a waste. That's all I meant."

She nodded, that infuriating slow smirk creeping across her lips. "Of course," she agreed. "Of _course_."

"I suppose it was luck," she said, over the noise of the vampires taking any excuse for a celebration behind them. Any reason for excessive ale consumption was worthwhile. Her hair is cut short now and she has a nasty violet bruise blossoming on her left cheek, and she's partly reliant on a crutch, but nevertheless the Trials are over for her now, for a second time.

He smiled down at her. "Something like that," he agreed. She was a _marvel._

"So are you sure you haven't anything to say to me," she continued. "Now that you know I'm not likely to die tomorrow?"

Of course she believed she could get the better of him, but just this once it was important for his to have the upper hand.

"I have nothing to say," he said, but then before she could think of anything clever to say to him, he slid his hand underneath her chin and kissed her.

She stumbled back a little. It was almost too much of a submission for it to truly be her, but then the second their lips parted she grinned.

"Knew it," she teased, and thought again it was _her _who had managed to regain the power over him, he realized that above all else perhaps it was the constant power struggle that so fascinated him.

At the very least, life was _never_ going to get boring.


End file.
